When unbelievers, skeptics and atheists assume that I have “blind faith” in my God, they are themselves making an un-informed assumption…
(2nd Mouse “Salt of the Earth”)
They want to tell me what I believe, when they probably don’t know. They have pre-judged me and concluded not only that I am so stupid that I must have no logical basis whatsoever for believing what I believe, but that they can bully me into thinking that what I believe is what they think I believe.
An otherwise excellent old British comedy series called “Not the Nine O’clock News” produced one somewhat blasphemous sketch/skit in which worshippers in a church are reciting their version of the “Apostles Creed”. While affirming in unison that they believe in the Father, the Son and so on, they include in their list, “telepathy, flying saucers, black magic, astrology, gay liberation (an interesting twist from only thirty years ago eh?), the Loch Ness monster and the abominable snowman. The idea is that Christians are the kind of people who will blindly believe anything, without reason or evidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUQcCvX2MKk
Other more contemporary comedians have selected Christians to be the subject of their derision and venom, Christians being a “soft” target. There is no comedian or comedy team willing to similarly mock Islam of course, which if nothing else demonstrates the cowardice of the comedian and also one of the many large differences between Christianity and Islam.
I can excuse the genuinely uninformed and the misinformed. Secularists have gained plenty of ground in recent decades in the West, and the education establishment, television networks, book publishers and other media outlets are purposefully void of balance when it comes to consideration of the miraculous and the divine, if there is any mention of God at all.
The Church, for the most part, hasn’t been engaging the culture and has become woefully derelict in informing its own people on such things as evidence for Biblical Creation and archeological and historical support for the authority and claims of Scripture. Skeptics can certainly gather plenty of ammunition for their mockery when they speak to professing Christians who either have no ability to defend their faith or who have denied many of the tenets of their faith in the first place. How can Christians defend a faith they don’t really have -no virgin birth, no resurrection, no creation but evolution instead? For true believers, the message of Scripture is that we are to be as informed as our intellect and our spiritual walk will allow:
“Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15 NIV).
I’ve written in previous posts that Christians are no more guilty of such things as ignorance than anyone else is. Becoming a Christian doesn’t suddenly increase the believer’s IQ to “genius” level. This is no indicator that the believer is wrong-only that he is human. There are just as many unbelievers around who have no ability to support their faith. I’ve asked many people who’ve insisted that we evolved from nothing to describe what evidence they have personally seen to support that claim. Most often they will look back at me blankly, then fall back on a cliché such as, “all the scientists believe it”, or “everyone knows it’s true”. Occasionally they will recite something a TV documentary or their science teacher told them, for example, the claim that bacteria is observed to be evolving in the lab. What does the bacteria “evolve” into- elephants?
No, I haven’t seen a man raised from the dead, and neither have you seen a goat or a wolf or a cow turn into a whale.
Evolutionists cannot produce any real evidence for people to observe with their own eyes…but people believe in it anyway. How is that being any less “gullible” than the expressed faith of a Christian?
Oh but “all the scientists believe it!” No, that isn’t true. Perhaps a majority will claim to believe it, because they want to keep their jobs and their careers and friends and their grant money coming in. But since when was a majority always right and unbiased?
In these days it’s fine for people to believe just about anything they want to believe-except the Christian gospel and Scriptures. A friend of mine recently told me in all seriousness that since there are an infinite number of universes (there is no evidence for that-it’s pure fantasy), he finds great pleasure in the knowledge that somewhere there is a parallel universe in which he doesn’t have to work, but spends his time relaxing on the beach instead. Not only is my friend ignoring the fact that if this is true there’s also a universe where he is being perpetually torn apart by ravenous lions, but he is selecting a total fantasy as his comfort, rather than even attempting to investigate the richly supported idea that there is a God who created him, who loves him and wants to communicate with him.
But we are living in an age where people believe not what they know to be true, but what they want to be true, and what others have told them is true- even if they’ve seen no evidence. This is being “gullible”, and the Christian is no more guilty of it than anyone else is. In fact, the informed Christian is wise and prudent. We exist-contrary to the rantings of some philosophers-and there can only be two alternative explanations for our existence. Either we evolved out of a puddle which came from an expansion of nothing or almost nothing, or we were created by an intelligent entity who is perfectly capable of communicating his plan of the ages. There is no video of either one.
The person who refuses to consider the Biblical God has nothing to gain and everything to lose, whereas the Christian has everything to gain and nothing to lose. There can be no good reason to accuse someone of being gullible for seeking that intelligent and loving Creator who offers us everything.
Fuel for Faith 